Just thought I would share what a modern sim should look like

here is how things should look these days.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2GuGtFkxZI

Yeah sure the sim looks good - but the menu will still look like Microsoft Excel in comparison to EAW! and that's coming from an IL-2 flyer!

AI and flight models to be sim level have a long way to go, but it is just beta so I have my hopes up.

Are you going to include the Western Front and the Pacific Theater as well?

It sure looks more like IL46 and not anything new my friend!

Please elaborate.

Hi,

new or not, the Flightmodel is IL-2 like and realy need a long way to go.

Both planes roll faster than even a FW190A would be able to and stalls or spins seems to be not existent. Same like in IL-2 a clean kill seems to be impossible, cause the planes keep their extreme manouverability at all speeds.
Hopefully they will take care same much about the FM/DM like they did regarding the graphics, otherwise its just another "Screenshot Sim".

Of course the graphics are outstanding in general, but how a pilot shal follow a target without padlock or fat icons is a miracle to me. At least on my side the planes turn to be extreme smal in not to far distance and particular invisible.

Incredible how much work they put into the look of the graphics, while playability related graphics seems to be far off.
Edit: I was wondering why that guy only make snapshots, but with the IL-2 like muzzle flashs, which cover the target, long shots are senceless anyway.
Imho a modern Sim must provide a graphic where the player can follow the targets without padlock(once he did spot it) and where he can shoot, without to get blind. What i see in this film is like what i saw in IL-2 some years ago, thats actually why i stopped to play IL-2.


Greetings,

Knegel

Looks good. The lighting effects add alot.

Looks lovely but I wonder what the framerate will be on my 2.6 Gig machine and geforce6800 card ??... even on minimum graphics settings!!... lol

and I wonder whether I can jump from plane to plane or whether I will have a tea-break length wait every time I crash...


still, lovely to watch and see what the rich can play...


cheers,


Pobs

Sorry to have to say this Pobs, but don't you think that maybe it is time to upgrade your machine to something a bit faster than a 2.6 Meg machine.
Even EAW will not run on a machine that slow.

I'd be happy to have a PIII 800 at the moment. Not all of us have pockets full of money for computers.

Hi John, I was just highlighting that Pobs had stated 2.7 Meg, rather than what he probably meant was 2.7 Gig Hz.

The very first IBM PC was already at 4.7 Meg (MHz). There never was a machine as slow as 2.7MHz in the IBM compatable PC range.

hehehe OK, fired the proof reader and edited the post ...


cheers,


Pobs

Are you kidding??

I did play IL-2 already with an K7 700MHz PC and a 32MB Graphiccard. Of course not at the highest level, but at that time 2.7GHz was still only a dream.

With my older 1600MHz PC and a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro IL-2 did run on highest settings with higher FPS than it did run EAW, even at ground level.

I think PC performence is not that much a argument anymore, for me actually it never was.

Btw, my current dual core 2400 GHz i got for free.
A brand new PC with so low specs have a price of maybe 250-300 Euro.

To hide behind PC performence dont realy work anymore, with some rare exceptions.
As i wrote in my 1st post, i got other arguments to stay with EAW.


Greetings,

Knegel

Exactly. I'm done chasing technology. Between that and the outrageous DRM schemes we are faced with these days I am bound and determined to become a technological hermit. I have more sims right now than I have time for and they all run great on my modest machine.

Hi Ralf,

sorry can't agree. I have BoB2 on this machine now and if I have a single plane in the air with reasonably high settings and I dive to view the ground objects, I can see the game slowing down, not quite a slide show but clearly less than 20 fps. When I last tried Il-2 it was on an old PIII, 450Mhz machine with a geforce 5700 card if I remember correctly, and I had to turn the settings so low the graphics were considerably worse than EAW. The comment regarding the 2.6MHz machine refer to the sim in the film, I don't know which version it is but I can pretty much guarantee you that my machine with this vid card would not run it at the sort of settings shown in anything other than a slideshow...:)

and like Col. Kern, I am not interested in any game that adds spyware in the form of a DRM scheme to my computer....so most modern sims are out for me anyway...

cheers,


Pobs

Let me be clear, in no way does Wings of Prey come close to EAW in SIM quality (which is on the light end) or address the issues that Knegel raises. That said, by modern standards you only need a modest cpu and gpu. But more than many can afford. My only point is that the graphics can look darn super. Some day my dreams of great graphics, good sim qualities, seeing planes at a distance, and good online connecton/play will all come together. RoF does good in all but the online play. In that game you have to wait until a game stops to be able to join on a server. WoP does super in the graphics. It still is beta so I have hopes of improvement.

Just thought it may be worthwhile about what this topic is supposed to be about.


I personally think that the looks of that sim are very good. Probably one of the best I have seen to date.

I do realise that many people are getting tired of chasing technology.
Hell I even get pissed off because it it so hard to find a microwave oven with just 2 knobs on it. One for the power level, and the other for the time duration. Why do we have to have things so complex and expensive all the time.

I am certain that we are all still running around in our model T Ford. After all who wants power steering and airconditioning in their car. It is also so invigerating getting up one hour before every one else, just to manually crank that old engine in the car to life every morning.

Maybe we should put things into perspective.
Performance doubles every 2 years or so at the same price point.
In 10 years time any new person coming into the computer market who purchases a new bottom end machine at that time will be able to run that game at full settings. There will be people on this forum saying "I refuse to update my machine all the time chasing technology for these new games when this old (10 year old game) runs so well".

How many of you own a plasm or LCD TV when an old black and white TV with a perspex tri color screen sitting over the front of it will give 3 color TV viewing???? I am certain none of you even considered the aspect of chasing technology in this case. Your new TV offers capabilities that your older ones could not match, so you purchased it.
The same applies with any new computer hardware as time progresses.
If you want realistic graphics, then you require more powerful hardware.
To get more powerful hardware, you pay more for it NOW, or you wait some time, until it costs peanuts. The choice is yours.

Hi Pobs,

i dont know BoBII, but what you see in that video, your PC by easy can handle.

I cant see any ground objects in that video, neighter real clouds.

And of course your 450MHz PC cant run IL-2 very well, but the is a smal different between 450 and 2700MHz and most probably your RAM is also bigger this day´s.

And of course, with extreme ground graphics you can kill the FPS of the best PC´s, but dont we look for flight experiences?? I think when flying with 500km/h you dont need to render every leaf and single stone.

With your PC you should be able to run all the BoBII planes with good fps, while you probably need to turn down the ground objects a little. Still the ground stuff will be better than what we have.

Included spy software of course is a reason not to use a software.

Greetings,

Knegel

Must admit I was at first a bit annoyed by another one of these posts, but then I thought why not make the best of it?

My opinion, critiques:

• Them - The terrain looks nice, but not totaly amazing.
• Us - We should be able to get some of ours closer now we have the 16 bit .bmps in game, if we use satellite and photo images, although to date no one has done one that good IMHO.

• Them - The citytown shown in the video not that great.
• Us - looks similar to my city tiles in GaznGuns-beta terrain, so I'm not that impressed. Compare:

• Them - The low level flight perspective I like. I believe it is more realistic.
• Us - Reminds me of an old test I did with larger fields made from a satellite terrain, which even roughly done at low / mid levels was better than most of our terrains, IMHO, due to the perspective it created, colors from the tiles, and the detail, but no one pursued it, and I never got back to it. I don't have the files on this PC or I could post a pic.
  The GaznGuns (mostly converted from Gunship) has a good lower level perspective also, if any try it.

Shreck also was trying some satellite terrains but he had to quit, and that was before we had the .bmp capability. Col. Gibbon also tried some recently.

EAW is obviously not capable of the highest visual qualities, but I think we can get a bit closer, but much more has to be paid attention to geting the terrain up to better quality, IMHO.

There is some work in progress towards getting more # of tiles variety capability into the terrain, which we need. Currently the 1.28 series can show 64 various tiles, an increase of 5 tiles from the 59 of old EAW 1.2.
Per a reliable unnamed source;

If the breakthrough is made.
I'm hoping for just a partial breakthrough, as mere fraction of that (@ a few hundred) would suffice, since the visual distance EAW renders tiles is not very far the tilea would not be repeated in visual range.

• Them - looked fun flying
• Us - is fun flying and we currently do all that with the best of them, if not better!

Us, and them.. And after all we're only ordinary men

Well,
don't know how it handles, but to me, it looks stunning!
The way the planes look is excellent, but what really intriques me
are some of the camera views and the way the planes don't seem 'attached'
to the view.......sort of a floating view.....
The lighting and reflections, to me, gave a great sense of realism and immersion.
Don't know if actually flying that sim would ruin that perspective, but just from
watching the video, this is how real I have always wanted a sim to look.

I too have flown IL-2 quite a bit, but could never get it to run uber, and was
never satisfied with the handling, and even flying at 3000 feet, I can see the
curvature of the earth......didn't like that at all.

The one thing that seems obvious to me thou, is that that sim has a flight-recorder!
THAT is what makes it possible to get such great video and camera views to make it
look so good!
We HAD a flight recorder in AOE and PAW. What happened to it when they developed EAW?
Can you imagine how many great missions that we could have shared amongst our
community? How many of you experienced that 'excellent' mission, that just 'happened'
and you were never able to re-create?

We are all 'use' to EAW......but if we EVER had out graphics looking that good, we
would all pee our pants.....you know this is true.....

AO

Works great on my super computer, but will it on yours?



VonBeerhofen

In that video I shared you don't get a close down to the buildings view. To bad because it is beyond great, it is almost real looking. In fact, when you are wizzing by at 160 mph you would think it is a real film. The cities and towns really look like cities and towns. Stalingrad - you can almost think you are flying over the real thing. All the explosions and battle stuff going on it gives a real life to the sim. RoF comes close to the same for cities and towns.

I was flying over Dover in WOP and decided to get out and Google Earth the city. I saw several thing. I was surprised that the port looked so much like that in the game. I suspect they took a google shot and reproduced it for the game. I moved around over Dover in Google and noticed Dover Castle. I then went back to the game and sure enough, they had recreated Dover Castle and much of the city was in the Google Earth layout. Some landmarks did not show up but others did.

The game is now released. $50. Expect great graphics but not great sim behavior, nor good AI behavior and a host of other things. If you have $50 to spend and a good machine less than 2 years old then buy it just for the fun of flying around.

Hi,

yes, i saw the outstanding ground objects etc in other film sequences and also the absolut horrible arcadish gameplay, what is a absolut shame for so good graphics.

That game is as much worth for a simmer, like to watch the plane sequences of Perl Habour or Dark Blue World.

I realy wonder, if we once will get a worthy successor for EAW, with same good immersion, playability and realism, but the perfect graphics of the modern games.

I can wait.

On the other hand, from playing IL-2 for around 3 years, i know that the outstanding close distance graphics lose much weight after the initial "WOW". Then its by far more important how realistic difficult it is to spot and/or identify a target and how realistic the guns and planes behave and how good the view systhem work, how good playable the cockpits are and how the icon system work.

I realy wonder why they create so phantastic close distance graphics, while they make the middle distance graphics so smal that playing without icons and padlock turn to be umplayable, while using icons mean that the sky is full of fat ugly icons.
They just have no good hand for a good balance, thats why EAW wont die in the near future.


Greetings,

Knegel

Yes, it amazes me that they have a zillion icons (on) or no icons.
I have always loved EAW for "one" icon at a time, and how well padlock
looks when you have all the icons info turned off.

AO

IL2 is still top notch...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MD5WTJYvqaI&feature=player_embedded

Yep, it is!

But the plane movement looks bad, like there is no inertia. The planes often move somewhat in steps, just exact fitting to the stick input. Thats also good visible when the heavy slow H111 start to spin, like there is no inertia or drag area left.

Hi guys,
IL-2 looks like all that and a bag of chips..........but.........
for me,....it only gives me 'all that' in a video.
In game, it doesn't look like that or sound like that....(To me, anyway.)

If we had a flight recorder for EAW "I" could make videos like that!

What would really make EAW fresh would be new voice-overs for all the voices
in EAW. For instance, this is why I like SAW. Someone took the time and tried
to use different voices, in spanish. (Although some of the American voices are
still in there.) Someone also made a female ground-controller!
AO

Hi AO.

Might be possible to have an in flight recorder, as the PAW recorder code is still around, just not used.

Hello all. I actually bought WoP and I am happy with it. I don't think it will replace EAW for me, just complement it, but I think it will replace Il-2 on my HD. Surprisingly I get about 70fps in high settings, on my 5yo P4 3.4, with about 40fps scooting over what are fabulously detailed cities. But it is not all graphics. The FMs on realistic (haven't even tried simulation) level are quite challenging and you will easily stall. Also the developers seem very open to suggestion from users and have agreed to provide full mission builder, quick mission builder and much else. Personally I don't think anything can compare with EAW for the sense of being in a complete air war, but this game looks the best thing I've seen for the option of a quick reasonably realistic dogfight in a real-looking world-view, but I think it's a bigger threat to Il-2 and perhaps, dare I say it, SOW, unless the latter will also run in a relatively modest pc-in present times will people be as able or willing to chase the technology?

Hi just to confirm the minimum and recommended systems for this one from their homepage :

Minimal System Requirements:
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3200MHz
RAM: 1024 Mb
Graphic card: NVIDIA GeForce 7600 256 Mb
HDD: 10 Gb free disk space
OS: Microsoft Windows XP SP3, DirectX 9.0c.
Soundcard, DirectX compatible
Internet connection: 56 kb/s
Keyboard, mouse

Recommended System Requirements:
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 2400 MHz
RAM: 2048 Mb
Graphic card: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 250 512 Mb
HDD: 10 Gb free disk space
OS: Microsoft Windows XP SP3 with DirectX 9.0c / Microsoft Windows Vista SP1 / Microsoft Windows 7
Sound card: DirectX compatible with support 5.1
Internet connection: 512 Kb/s
Keyboard, mouse, joystick


cheers,


Pobs

My praise is for the movie maker.
Best one-on-one turnfight 'death match' sequence I have ever seen in a game video. As good as a professional movie, given the poor YouTube picture quality.
Plenty of suspense and near-crashes over several minutes of action, interesting moves, and a disappointment to see a fine flyer auger into a fireball.

As for a few "modern" versus "EAW Renovated" comparisons:
--EAW. Easier to get a hit on your opponent. Let's face it: that's the name of the game.
--WoP. Great terrains, especially at low level. Some EAW ones are damn good, however, if not at low level.
--WoP. Really like some of the rear cockpit views. EAW's are blocked out a bit too much in many cases. Hey! Give the player a chance to see behind; it's tough enough flying and fighting a sim.
--EAW. Flight models do seem better. Knegel is right. These WoP aircraft seem invulnerable to laws of flight, such as stalls, or they have outstanding pilots; and they are a bit too lively. But, it's a video, not actually flying the sim. So judgement is tentative.
--EAW. Number of aircraft involved. No way to judge this in the vid, but I believe EAW would probably come out on top. Which is why this 2-plane WoP fight can be so engrossing.
--??? Tracking opponents.

It is difficult to follow the action sometime because flight sims do not give us the eagle-eye "close up" feeling that a pilot gets in Real Life. Though this video does a good job of keeping us in the action.
It is not likely a real pilot will lose an opponent at 500-700 meters in the ground clutter where we have trouble following on a computer screen. Camouflage is not THAT good. Hard to tell just how far apart they are on the video, but Real Life pilots again and again say they spot and identify aircraft at distances of more than a mile.
This is a price we pay for playing on a computer screen.

EAW has very good 'distance' models so a pilot can usually follow opponents moves. The simplified distance models make following a turn easier.

I once did an experimental change in making aircraft sizes bigger to see if a more immediate sense of involvement can be gotten if the aircraft appeared much closer. Something that is entirely possible to be done in EAW.
Crashin' Jack tried my experiment and reported it was disconcerting; he tried to start shooting way too soon!
Might take a little getting used to this.
Maybe a computer slowdown of flying speeds so the pilot gets a better sense of low down flying might work.
Naw. We love only having 2 seconds to hit that tank or truck.